Published:Za PravduNo. 47, November 29, 1913.

      Signed:V. I..

      Published according to theZa Pravdutext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 19,

      pages513-515.Translated:The Late George HannaTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Sometimes“incidents” occur in politics when the nature
of a certain order of things is revealed, as it were, suddenly, and with
extraordinary power and clarity in connection with some relatively minor
happening.

Zabernis a small town in Alsace. Over forty years ago Alsace was
severed from France by the victorious Prussians (with only one party in
Germany, the Social-Democratic Party, emphatically protesting). For over
forty years the French population of Alsace has been forcibly
“Germanised” and “driven” by every possible form of pressure into the
royal Prussian, drill-sergeant, bureaucratic discipline that is called
“German culture”. But the Alsatians have been retorting to all this with
their hymn of protest: “You have taken our Alsace and our Lorraine, you
may Germanise our field, but, never, never, never will you capture our
hearts.”

Oneday a Prussian aristocrat, a young officer named Forstner brought
things to a climax. He grossly insulted the Alsatian people (he used the
wordWackes, a coarse term of abuse). The German Purishkeviches
had used this sort of language in barracks a million times without causing
any trouble, but the million and first time—the fat was in the fire!

Thepent-up anger of decades against tyranny, nagging and insult,
against decades of forced Prussianisation, burst out on the surface. It was
not a revolt of French culture against German culture. The
Dreyfus case[1]showed that there is as much crude militarism capable
of every kind of savagery, barbarism, violence and crime in France as in
any other country. No, this was not a revolt of Frenchculture against German culture, but the revolt of the democracy fostered by
a number of French revolutions against absolutism.

Theunrest of the population, their resentment against the Prussian
officers, the jeers hurled at these officers by the proud, freedom-loving
French crowd, the rage of the Prussian militarists, the arbitrary arrests
and assaults on people in the street—all this gave rise in Zabern (and
later throughout Alsace) to “anarchy”, as the bourgeois news papers call
it. The landowning, “Octobrist”, clerical, German Reichstag, by an
overwhelming majority, passed a resolutionagainstthe Imperial
German Government.

“Anarchy”is a silly catchword. It presupposes that there has been
and still is in Germany an “established” civil, legal system which, on
the instigation of the devil, has been violated. The catchword “anarchy”
is impregnated through and through with the spirit of official, university
German “scholarship” (with apologies to real scholarship), the
scholarship that cringes before the landowners and the militarists, and
sings the praises of the exceptional “rule of law” in Germany.

TheZabern incident showed that Marx was right when, nearly forty years
ago, he described the German political system as a “military despotism,
embellished with parliamentary
forms”.[2]Marx’s appraisal of the real nature of the German
“constitution” was a hundred thousand timesmore profoundthan
those of hundreds of bourgeois professors, priests and publicists who sang
the praises of the “legal state”. They all bowed and scraped in face of
the successes and triumphs of the German rulers of the day. In appraising
the class nature of politics, Marx was not guided by the “zigzag” of
events, but by theentireexperience ofinternationaldemocracy and of the international working-class movement.

Itwas not “anarchy” that “burst out” in Zabern; it was thetruenature of the German regime, the sabre rule of the Prussian
semi-feudal landowners that was aggravated and came to the surface. If the
German bourgeoisie had possessed a sense of honour, if it had possessed
brains and a conscience, if it had believed what it said, if its deeds were
not in contradiction to its words, in short, if it werenota
bourgeoisieconfronting millions of socialist proletarians, the Zabern “incident”
would have been “incidental” to the bourgeoisie’s becoming republican. As
it is, the whole affair will be confined to platonic protests by bourgeois
politicians—in parliament.

Butthings will not stop there outside parliament. The mood of the
petty-bourgeois masses in Germany has been and is undergoing a
change. Conditions have changed, the economic situation has changed,all the propsof the “peaceful” rule of the aristocratic
Prussian sabre have beenunder mined. Whether the bourgeoisie
likes it or not,eventsare sweeping it towards a profound
political crisis.

Thetime when the “German Michael” slumbered peace fully under the
guardianship of the Prussian Purishkeviches, while the course of Germany’s
capitalist development was exceptionally favourable, has gone. The general,
fundamental collapse is irresistibly maturing and approaching....

[1]TheDreyfus case—the trial in 1894 of Dreyfus, a Jewish
General Staff officer who was falsely accused of espionage and high
treason; the trial was staged for provocative purposes by French
reactionary militarists. A Court Martial sentenced Dreyfus to imprisonment
for life. The strong public movement for a review of the case led to a
sharp conflict between republican and monarchist forces in France. Dreyfus
was acquitted in 1906.

Lenindescribed the Dreyfus case as “one of the many thousands of
fraudulent tricks of the reactionary military caste”.

[2]SeeK. Marx and F. Engels, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”,Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 33.